This is a shot created using HDR photography. For those who haven’t heard of it, or have heard of it and don’t know what people are jibbering on about, it stands for High Dynamic Range. A standard camera is only capable of capturing a certain range of tones in a single shot. This means that if you take a shot similar to the one here, then you can either expose for the sky (which would put the foreground here in more-or-less total darkness), or you can expose for the foreground (which would blow out the sky, as it would be massively overexposed. The happy medium is to average your exposure. This would have the effect of the sky being too over-exposed AND the foreground being underexposed).

So… where does HDR come in? Well, it involves taking a series of bracketed shots. This means taking one shot at the correctly metered exposure, one at a lower exposure (usually 1-2 stops), and one at a higher exposure (again, usually 1-2 stops). You then use a processing package such as Photomatix (http://www.hdrsoft.com/) to combine them all, bringing out the detail in the better-exposed parts of each to make an overall image. The result can be extremely dramatic, much more closely matching the type of view you get with the naked eye (which has a massively higher dynamic range than a camera sensor). HDR started out as a bit of a black art, and whilst still not the simplest of techniques, applications like Photomatix have made the whole process a lot easier.